Muqarnas in Blender: Modelling and Rendering - pille

units. Finally, I rotated the still selected vertices by 45 ◦ and dragged them to fit
together with the rest of the mesh (top view should be a right triangle). The point
where the two (former) basic side views meet has to be the end where the element
is open.
The second "new" intermediate element resembles the small biped, but it has
no inner edge. Its construction is similar to the one just described. This time,
however, I simply extruded the basic side view (without rotating it in advance),
and rotated the still selected vertices by 45 ◦ . In contrast to the first element, it is
the back ends of the basic side view which are supposed to meet now, so that the
element gets a pedestal like the bipeds.
3 Materials and Textures
In order to obtain a realistic modelling of a muqarnas, the elements have to be as-
signed adequate materials and textures. According to Harb, the elements where
typically cast in plaster; one could also imagine some kind of clay.
Before trying to create a new material, I examined a very good material library
for Blender, the matlib_v102. It already contained some suitable materials, the
best ones being stone_concrete and stone_sandstone (even if these might not be a
traditional muqarnas material, they look fine with the elements). From stone_clay
I derived a new material, which can also be seen in the figure. Nevertheless, I
decided to use two sorts of sandstone material (white and red) for the example
muqarnas. 1
The inner faces of cells are usually textured in some way, either by paintings,
tiles or reliefs. For this project, the IWR provided three previously scanned and
composed textures which I applied to the faces by UV mapping. Before that the
faces had to be prepared. A problem occurring with the cells that had been ex-
truded was that the selected faces did not end at the inner edge, but reached into
the cell, resulting in distorted and incompletely visible textures. The only solu-
tion I found was to cut these faces along the inner edge using Blender’s Knife
Tool. After this step (which is admittedly a little bit tricky) it is possible to select
only the visible faces. Since these are many small slices, it may be convenient to
join the slices on each side (Edit Mode: select faces + FKEY) so that one can select
two large faces instead of all the parts.
1 At this point I wondered how new materials, which of course do not exist in any library, can
be imported into a different Blender file. The solution is very easy: All .blend files contain several
folders in which all properties of the created scene are stored. With "Append" from the File Menu
(or SHIFT + F1), it is possible to select any .blend file, browse its folders and choose what one
wants to import (objects, materials, textures etc.).
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